The Children of the King (3 page)

The village station was usually a lonely place, having been built too ambitiously for the town it served; normally five or six souls wandered the oversized platform, and the distances between them could be so vast that they might each have been waiting for different trains on different days. Normally the busiest activity came from the swifts which ceaselessly skimmed the ornate roof, their rough dry nests crafted into corners, their chicks hidden from view.

But perhaps the grandiose station had been built, so long ago, for this singular day.

The evacuees poured from the train like an army. Large groups of children had already disembarked at two or three stations earlier along the way: now, at this grand station, the last and largest group was disgorged, wide-eyed and wittering. The ladies travelling with the children grasped wrists, pointed fingers, clapped forthright hands. In no time at all they had the evacuees in line, each child gripping the fingers of another, each suitcase by its correct owner’s side. Caps were adjusted, hems were straightened, smudges were removed with a licked thumb. Then the ladies led this crocodile of mites out of the station and into the day, across the road and through the open doors of the town hall.

Cecily Lockwood stood surrounded by a wall of luggage, observing in silence as the crocodile disappeared head-first into the town hall. Heron Hall’s car was waiting at the kerb, a luggage van standing behind it. Heron Hall was the kind of house whose car was never late — not because its owner, Mr Peregrine Lockwood, was particularly concerned about time, but because, around him, the world fell gracefully into place. The luggage had arrived all present and accounted-for, the afternoon sun was making a real effort to shine. Even Heloise had slightly thawed; she smiled at the porters, said, “Doesn’t the air smell fresh?”

People, mostly women but also men, were following the evacuees into the town hall. As Cecily understood it, when they came out they would be in the company of a child, a chosen child, the one they would adopt for the duration of the war. While Heloise gave instructions to the porters about which cases to load first or most carefully, Cecily stared at the town hall, her eyes gobbling everything. Women crossed the hall’s threshold, some tentative, some eager. Some were village ladies, neatly dressed and clean. Others were farm ladies, also neat and clean. Some had friendly faces, some looked as if they’d been sent on a chore. Cecily thought of what would greet these women beyond the doors — the gazing faces, the red-rimmed eyes. Her heart strained on its leash.

Heloise believed she’d heard something shiver, so a box was opened and inspected. The dinner set inside was perfect, so it was a mystery. Heloise rewrapped each piece with care. “It’s extremely expensive,” she told the porters.

Then Cecily, watching closely, saw a woman come out of the hall. She was holding the hand of a curly-haired boy. He was looking up at her, and he forgot about the steps; but the woman held his hand and didn’t let him fall. Cecily’s heart thumped.

A minute passed, and another woman appeared. Behind her came a stunned-looking girl who had a grip on a younger boy. Two children! Cecily’s heart flipped. She hadn’t realised it was permissible to take two. If two could be taken, soon there would be nothing left. And now more ladies were gliding into the hall, friends laughing as though they were entering a tea shop for cake, and the woman with the curly-haired boy and the second woman with the siblings were disappearing down the street. Cecily’s heart stretched its tether, she was suddenly more likely to fly than remain silent: “Mama!” she yelped. “Can we have a child?”

Heloise was not surprised to hear this. Her daughter wanted every homeless kitten and pup she saw. An encounter with a nestling fallen from its eyrie meant an afternoon of tears. “There’s plenty of people who’ll take them,” she said. “Do not make a fuss please, Cecily.”

Jeremy was standing by the car, having said nothing since disembarking beyond a greeting to Hobbs, Heron Hall’s driver. Hobbs spent a lot of time poking about the fields in search of artefacts, and whenever he was at Heron Hall on holiday, Jeremy helped him. Last summer they’d found a small clay jar imprinted with the swollen face of a god; and inside the jar, besides dirt and ash, were countless miniature bones. Cat bones, said Peregrine Lockwood; finger bones, according to Hobbs. Jeremy had been silently watching the passers-by, the painstaking loading of the luggage, the comings and goings around the town hall. Now he spoke up. “We should take one, Mother.”

Heloise paused; she always paused for her son. A gritty gust came out of the station and flapped the hem of her skirt. “Oh Jeremy,” she said.

“We should. It’s the right thing to do.”

He didn’t seem to be suggesting it out of kindness or to indulge his sister, but because it was
the
right thing to do.
Nonetheless Cecily longed to jump at him, perhaps give him a little loving strangle. She resisted.

“Taking in an evacuee helps with the war effort.” Jeremy touched a finger to a blot on the car’s shiny bonnet. “If circumstances allow it, I don’t know how one can justifiably refuse.”

When Jeremy spoke in this high-flown manner, Cecily usually saw red. Now she held her breath and looked at her mother, who teetered with uncertainty. The breeze blew, and Heloise put a hand to her hat. “We’re guests at Heron Hall,” she said. “You would need Peregrine’s permission . . .”

Cecily swung back to the town hall. People were stepping through its doors — not an unbroken flow of people, not a gushing crowd, but certainly a steady stream, and some of them were hurrying — and people were coming out. Beside them were one or two, even
three
children, in one case of greed. She sucked down a whimper, her heart kicked and squirmed.

Jeremy said, “Peregrine won’t mind. He’d support the war effort. And we’re not really
guests,
are we.”

As they were in public, Heloise refrained from smiling. “Relatives are guests,” she said. But her children knew she was recalling that coy fact which she never truly forgot: one day her son would inherit Heron Hall. They weren’t guests: they were owners-in-waiting. “Oh, I don’t know!” She dashed her hands to her sides. “Another woman’s child. It’s a responsibility . . .”

“Just a small one!” said Cecily.

“Everyone should do what they’re capable of doing. Logically, people like us should take a dozen.”

“A dozen!” Heloise looked at the porters, who were tying down the luggage, and at Hobbs, who was waiting patiently by the car. None of these obliged in sharing her alarm. “I don’t think we could cope with a dozen!”

Jeremy shrugged. “I’m just saying what’s logical.”

A clump of townsfolk emerged from the hall, friends introducing their new children to each other, encouraging them to likewise be friends. “Mama!” Cecily squawked. “Just a little one? Please?”

Their mother was not the type to argue long, fearing it gave her wrinkles and aware from experience that she could turn her back on anything that came to displease her. “I suppose we can have a quick look,” she sighed, which, when she said the same thing about toy shops, meant Cecily would get a new doll.

So Cecily bolted. She was halfway across the road when she noticed her brother wasn’t following, and stopped. “Aren’t you coming?”

Jeremy shook his head. He said, “Choose one who’ll be your friend.”

The town hall’s doorway was a gaping mouth, a babble of voices coming from within. Cecily waited for her mother, took her mother’s hand. The hall was a huge, high-ceilinged room with a stage at one end. Sitting on the wooden floor were the evacuees, their name tags dog-eared, suitcases by their sides. Among them walked ladies and gentlemen exchanging a smile here, a raised eyebrow there, as though the children were cakes in a fairground competition and the townsfolk were bakery judges. Among them too walked the ladies from the train, now carrying pens and clipboards. The hall was cold, as if winter hibernated in this place while summer frolicked outside. Some children were crying tiredly.

A lady with a clipboard came up to Heloise. “Good afternoon, may I help you?”

Heloise gave her a martyr’s smile.

Cecily didn’t listen closely to what the billeting officer told her mother, nor to how her mother replied. Gazing about, she knew she’d never seen anything so strange as this sea of children. Some of them — the oldest ones, the ones who weren’t smartly dressed, the ones not absolutely clean — were receiving only passing glances from the people, while in the far corner two men and two women were arguing over who’d been first to claim a cherubic boy. A small weeping girl was being soothed by her sister while a woman stood to one side, waiting to take the older girl away. “It’s never easy,” Cecily heard the officer say.

Most of the children, however, weren’t crying. Some of them were whispering. Others were staring as dubiously at the adults as the adults were staring at them. Some slapped and pinched each other, some scowled and bounced their heels. Some rummaged in their suitcases. Many looked wanly terrified.

The billeting officer was smiling. “They don’t all understand why they’re here. And most of them would prefer not to be, of course.”

“Do you think they’ll be — difficult?” asked Heloise.

The official waved her clipboard. “There are always troublemakers, aren’t there? In every walk of life. Everything is being done for their own good, but not all of them see it that way. In general, however, we expect the arrangements to be happy. You’ll get a lot of satisfaction from hosting a child for the duration.”

Heloise stared doubtfully around the hall. The word
troublemakers
had made her flinch as if from a paper cut. She glanced at the doorway, but it was impossible to escape now. In this town people knew her face, had seen her trunks arrive, noted her entering the hall, would see her hurry away. All she could do was make the best of the situation. Because she tended to equate dirt with trouble, she told her daughter what many others had told themselves: “Choose a nice one. Not one of the . . . grubby ones. Not a . . . lout.”

But Cecily, who was experiencing not an ounce of doubt, had already spotted the one she wanted, a child sitting composed beside a tartan-patterned suitcase. If this child had been a doll, she wouldn’t have been locked in the glass cabinet, accessible only with the shopkeeper’s key. She wasn’t particularly well-dressed or special. But her bobbed black hair was silky and her skin was clean, and in her blue eyes was a glint that looked painted there by a toymaker in a mischievous mood. Cecily sidled close, chirped, “Hello!”

The girl’s eyes were not the insipid blue of morning, but the cobalt of tropical birds. They watched Cecily warily. “Hello.”

“What’s your name? How old are you?”

As if her identity had been recently changed, the girl glanced at her tag. “May Enid Bright. I’m ten.”

“I’m Cecily Lockwood. I’m twelve.”

May Bright nodded, but not as if this was interesting.

“Do you have brothers and sisters, or are you here by yourself ?”

“Just me,” said the evacuee.

Cecily hugged her coat. Everything felt good. “Would you like to come and stay with us? My uncle has a house in the country, that’s where we’ll be living. There are sheep and chickens and a cow, and a dog named Byron. I have a brother, Jem, he’s fourteen, he’s outside. He’s all right, not horrible —” She petered out, rummaging for words which she sensed were not there: for the first time in her life, Cecily discovered she didn’t actually know how to get what she wanted. She had never pleaded or negotiated. Everything had simply arrived. The realisation made her feel a bit shipwrecked. “You’ll have lots to eat,” she tried, “and a big bed to sleep in.”

May Bright nodded again; but the glint in her eyes suggested she could live off scraps and sleep soundly in hay, and that Cecily needed to do better. Taxed, Cecily looked around, at the questioning adults and answering children, at the falling-down socks and the jetsam of luggage and the creased identity tags. There was a smell to match the sight — unaired clothes, stale bread — and a sound as well. Fists on boards, shuffling paper, a toddler’s trenchant whine. “I have a lot of toys,” she offered, “but you can play with them. I won’t mind. I wouldn’t even mind if you broke them. I’d know you hadn’t done it on purpose.”

“I don’t break things,” said the evacuee.

“Oh, I do.” Cecily sighed. “I’m a clumsy-clot. Once I broke a football. How do you do that?”

The raven-haired child gazed at her without smiling, perhaps wondering if she too would fall to pieces in the care of this lummox. All around them children were being escorted from the hall, hands waving, tears dropping. Spaces were opening up on the floor, leaving circles like vacated nests. Soon there would be little choice left for both those who would take, and those who would be taken. Without a word the evacuee reached for her case, and Cecily brightened. “So you’ll come?”

“Yes,” said May, as if it wasn’t really anyone’s business. “I will.”